12. Wooden coffin still used by the Kafirs in Nuristan, alone among Afghan
tribesmen. The coffins mistaken by Alexander's men for firewood in this area were presumably the ancestors of this distinctive style. Greek influence, perhaps from later Greek kingdoms in Bactria, has also been noted in the carved pillars of Kafir buildings.
13. Modern raft of goat skin for use near the Oxus. These rafts are sewn and stuffed with chaff, one of Asia's oldest skills. The Assyrian armies used them in the seventh century BC; Alexander crossed the Danube and Oxus by the same method; Roman armies kept a unit of 'bladder bearers' for the purpose. A man can float on one skin only, but this large raft could carry up to 400 lbs .
16. The Lion of Hamadan, probable monument to Hephaistion .
17. The funeral chariot to take Alexander's body from Babylon. The detailed
ancient description is the basis for this outline reconstruction by G. Niemann .
with the diadem and, after plunder, a return to western Asia. Conspiracy followed fast on the change in Alexander's myth: 'Alexander was right', wrote Napoleon, in retirement on St Helena, 'to have Parmenion and his son killed, because they were blockheads who considered it wrong to abandon the customs of the Greeks.' When two events are so close in time, it is indeed attractive to link them as cause and effect.
This background of principles and personalities makes Philotas's guilt very plausible, but it is not enough to prove it. For in Philotas's case, so far as it is known, there were few solid truths which the informers could have adduced. They cannot have known him to be involved in the conspiracy, for they chose him as the fit man to expose it to Alexander; there were further accomplices of whom they were unaware at the time, but their ignorance about Philotas cannot have lent support to their other evidence. Had Philotas indeed been plotting, he would have welcomed the informer's approaches as a stroke of extraordinary luck; he could have arranged for them to be silenced or at least acted swiftly before they turned to anyone else. But he had done neither: he had simply suppressed their rumour, and although this negligence was held against him it strongly suggests that he had no part in the conspiracy. He did not take it seriously, because he did not care: that, perhaps, was criminal in its own right, especially to Alexander's friends who hated him anyway. In Seistan influence ran strongest among the bodyguards and baronial leaders of the phalanx, Craterus again most prominent among them. But Philotas was a cavalryman, whose platoons had been subdivided a year ago between minions chosen for merit, not nobles distinguished by birth. He was vulnerable, therefore, and unpopular: enemies led by Craterus, may have seized their chance to bring him down.
Even so the affair is more of a mystery than a scandal. A letter is said to have been cited, written by Parmenion to his two sons, at least a month before: 'First, take care for yourselves, for in that way, we shall bring off our plans.' Even if genuine, it was most ambiguous: it helped little that Philotas, as a last resort, blamed the design on a certain Hegelochus, as Hegelochus was recently dead. Nobody believed that Philotas was innocent and it is absurd to idealize him as a martyr to Alexander's ruthlessncss simply because the histories explain so little. Neither the timing nor the method of his death suggest the affair was a ruthless purge. Had Alexander wished to kill an innocent man, he could have poisoned him, exposed him in battle or quietly lost him on the next mountain march; he had no need to prosecute him clumsily in a public trial, where other suspects contrived to acquit themselves despite his prosecution. Above all, the moment was far from ripe for sly murder. A ruthless intriguer would first have detached Parmenion from his resources, waited for Cleitus and the 6,000 veterans and then pounced secretly: the man who staged an inopportune trial in Seistan must surely have believed that right, and a grievance, were suddenly on his side. Numbers, certainly, were not.
Whatever its precise justice, condemnation of Philotas made Parmenion's murder inevitable. It was a grave risk but it had to be taken, for Parmenion was the most powerful figure in the entire army, well up to the art of judicial murder himself and he could not possibly have been left alive to use his resources and supporters for a rebellion based on Hamadan. A fight against Cleitus's veterans and 20,000 troops was not to be relished, especially when they held the money and could find more food. Parmenion, powerful father to a condemned son, was a threat quite unprecedented since Alexander's accession, and it is not in the least surprising that in self-defence Alexander arranged his assassination. It is irrelevant to complain that he might have mistaken his general's ambitions; among Macedonians, the king who waited in a crisis in order to be certain would find himself dead first. There was no law to protect and limit the monarchy: custom could be ignored by a strong character, and self-preservation went just as far as the people would condone. It was said, perhaps correctly, that the soldiery in Seistan had approved Parmenion's murder before it was ordered: certainly, most of them cared little when they heard of it, and even the troops in Hamadan were pacified. Alexander had friends there, among them Harpalus the treasurer, and they had seen him through; doubtless by royal request, it was now that Parmenion's memory would be blackened in court histories. The victory on the Granicus, the burning of Persepolis were probably rewritten against a murdered general.
Among the officers there was consternation. The noblemen in the cavalry panicked and began to fly to the desert, fearing their past friendships in the light of what had happened. Alexander was forced to announce that relations of the conspirators would not now be punished, although his rapid treatment of Philotas's father had implied exactly the opposite. In an emergency nothing breaks quicker than a clique of family and friends: Philotas, for example, had been accused most vigorously by his own brother-in-law, while Parmenion had been murdered by this same turncoat's brother in Hamadan. Such men were scared of their former connections, and they betrayed them decisively. Others, absent from camp, could not be so bold; Asander, perhaps the brother or nephew of Parmenion, was away in the west raising reinforcements, but he is not known to have received another job when he arrived in camp a year and a half later. Possibly he died of sickness or a wound, but more probably Parmenion's name was held against him.
With the plot only half-uncovered, Alexander could not afford to be too magnanimous. For some months the army's letters home had been opened and censored in secret: now Parmenion's few known sympathizers were separated into a unit known as the Disorderlies, along with any who had complained in their letters of military service. Their discipline was to be stern, but 'no group was ever keener for war: they were all the braver for being disgraced, both because they wished to redeem themselves and because courage was more conspicuous in a small unit': any who malingered could always be abandoned in the next Alexandria.
There remained the Companion cavalry. They had been led by Philotas 'but it was not thought safe to entrust them now to any one man'. Hephaistion took half the command as an officer above suspicion and known to sympathize with Alexander's Persian customs; the other half was left open until the missing 6,000 Macedonians arrived from Hamadan. Their loyalty, or their ignorance, had helped to decide Parmenion's fate. Many were veterans, Philip's men, and they arrived to find a court much changed from the one they had left at Hamadan; their king had his eunuchs, ushers and diadem. Their loyalty had to be repaid and reassured; they had been led to camp by Cleitus, also a veteran and the most experienced leader of cavalry. Cleitus was named as the second Hipparch, beside Hephaistion who had never led horsemen. His promotion would steady a shaken high command, but it was a reward not altogether of Alexander's choosing.